The Hong Kong government, in common with many others around the world, has experienced major difficulties in implementing educational reforms. The nature of the constraints on implementation, however, have differed significantly between the pre- and post-1997 periods. During the transition to Chinese sovereignty, the colonial government sought to avoid friction with teachers and pressure groups which might have resulted from determined efforts to implement its reforms. Policy, consequently, was usually symbolic and often remained at the level of rhetoric. The post-1997 government has shown more intent to bring about change but has been hampered both by an inherited culture of inertia and cynicism towards reform and by the dysfunctions of a disarticulated political system which have led to problems of co-ordination and a loss of capacity. The article analyses the relationship between educational reform and the changing political system and concludes that reform remains an elusive objective.
[Copyright of Journal of Education Policy is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000042218 ]

This paper directly tests for differences in returns to education between the employed and self-employed in Hong Kong. Using a step-function, we find significantly smaller returns for the self-employed, suggesting that in the highly competitive labor market of Hong Kong education plays a signaling role. This pattern persists for both genders, when accounting for self-selection into employment status and when accounting for self-employed professionals who signal.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0964529042000193925]

This study followed 88 children in Beijing and Hong Kong for three years to investigate the relationships between the early teaching of literacy skills and later literacy outcomes. The children were administered the Preschool and Primary Chinese Literacy Scale at the age of five years, and three years later. Their parents and teachers reported on their involvement in literacy teaching, the home/classroom literacy environment and their beliefs about language learning. Findings showed that the Hong Kong cohort significantly surpassed their Beijing counterparts in literacy attainments at age five and age eight. After controlling for age, site, maternal education and teacher qualification, formal literacy activities in early childhood significantly contributed to literacy attainment at primary school, whereas informal literacy experiences did not. Results suggest that the complicated nature of Chinese orthography may make early instruction particularly valuable in Chinese literacy acquisition. The psycholinguistic, pedagogical and sociocontextual accounts and implications of these findings are discussed.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430600789365]

This article analyses the varied characteristics of histories of education in Hong Kong and discusses the perspectives that an acquaintance with them can provide. Such a focus encourages consideration of the use of incomplete sources by historians of education, as well as attempts to make sense of past educational developments through periodization. The author adopts a periodization scheme associated with colonialism, which facilitates the identification of mysteries (questions derived from incomplete evidence) and the explanation of myths (answers based on incomplete evidence). He anticipates that a similar approach to other societies could stimulate similar insights into both mysteries and myths.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600600851136]